Ai Weiwei
Ai Weiwei

The Chinese art world does not exist. In a society that restricts individual freedoms and violates human rights, anything that calls itself creative or independent is a pretence. It is impossible for a totalitarian society to create anything with passion and imagination.

George Berkeley
George Berkeley

Others indeed may talk, and write, and fight about liberty, and make an outward pretence to it; but the free-thinker alone is truly free.

Gina Miller
Gina Miller

I make no pretence at being well-versed in politics - it is all too often about personalities and emotion - but I do know a thing or two about our constitution, as I once trained to be a lawyer. Even a first-year law student learns that an overriding principle is that parliament is sovereign.

Havelock Ellis
Havelock Ellis

Jealousy, that dragon which slays love under the pretence of keeping it alive.

Jacob Rees-Mogg
Jacob Rees-Mogg

I've made no pretence to be a modern man at all, ever.

James Payn
James Payn

In all highly civilised communities Pretence is prominent, and sooner or later invades the regions of Literature.

James Payn
James Payn

In England, literary pretence is more universal than elsewhere from our method of education.

James Russell Lowell
James Russell Lowell

Sincerity is impossible, unless it pervade the whole being, and the pretence of it saps the very foundation of character.

Josh Widdicombe
Josh Widdicombe

I've got no pretence that I want to do 'Hamlet' or anything, I know my limitations.

Michael Wolff
Michael Wolff

The rise of Donald Trump established a new ground zero for liberal media, requiring no pretence of balance - better yet, with a kind of political brain haemorrhage, everybody seemed to have lost the ability to be balanced.